Pam Adams: Final points about ticketed students

Friday

Oct 26, 2007 at 12:01 AMOct 26, 2007 at 3:11 AM

Correction: Not all of the 32 hit with ordinance violations for walking in the street were Manual or Woodruff high school students. There's a good chance some weren't students at all. At least two were middle school students.

Pam Adams

Correction: Not all of the 32 hit with ordinance violations for walking in the street were Manual or Woodruff high school students. There's a good chance some weren't students at all. At least two were middle school students.
"We knew you couldn't walk in the street, but we didn't know you could get a ticket for crossing the street," says Paris Jordan, a sixth-grader at Lincoln Middle School who just turned 12.
Jordan and her friend Jewrita Sampson, 13, a Lincoln seventh-grader, say they walked from school to Jordan's home in the 600 block of Voris. From there, they began walking across the street in a diagonal line. That's when police gave them $75 tickets for "walking in the highway."
"I thought they were just pulling us over for a talk," Sampson says.
Clarification (for the umpteenth time): Nobody has condoned kids disobeying the law or walking in the streets. Rita Ali - the witness who helped organize a protest and press conferences denouncing police tactics - acknowledged in her initial complaint to police that she's had problems driving down side streets filled with kids.
Peoria Police Chief Steven Settingsgaard has said increased attention to poor sidewalk conditions in some areas is the one good thing that could come out of the controversy surrounding the department's shock-and-awe crackdown of Sept. 28. "Some of them are impassable," he conceded during a press conference defending the crackdown last week.
Resolution: Details haven't been worked out, but Ali, Settingsgaard, local and state NAACP President Don Jackson and City Manager Randy Oliver were among those who worked out a face-saving, sensible compromise Monday. Fines will be dropped for ticketed students who attend all-school assemblies on safety and the law. City leaders and police also promised to continue meeting with representatives from the black community.
Unfortunately, Peoria School District 150 wasn't included in Monday's negotiating session. It should have been. Some of the poorly planned aspects and subsequent tension over the tickets might have been avoided in the first place had there been better communication between the police and schools.
Reaction: Manual seniors Breon Wright, LaJuan Porch and William Schwab say they'll be among the first in line at their school assembly. The three suspect they were among the very few seniors, especially job-holding seniors, of the 22 ticketed in the Manual area. It might not have been easy, Wright says, but they could have paid their tickets themselves rather than dip into parental wallets. He doesn't think that's true for most of the students ticketed near Manual.
"It was really messed up for them," he says. "I see these little freshmen and sophomores. ... They're amped up about coming to school and getting good grades and then this happens. ... You might as well say they're harassing us for going to school."
Denise Westhafer is the mother of Schwab, one of the few white youth ticketed by police. "Just because the tickets are dropped doesn't mean we can forget this problem of racial profiling," she says. "I see how these police jump out and bumrush the kids."
Kathy Jordan, Paris Jordan's mother, says the solution, as announced, is on the right track. But she worries about how children receive the message police are trying to send. "You tell your children to trust police, but it's hard to make them listen when things like this happen," she says. "We need some healing."
And a postscript: Students have been roundly chastised for walking in the middle of the street. People throughout the city have offered their own anecdotal incidents with road walkers as justification for a crackdown on ill-mannered, intimidating children who don't respect authority.
One point overlooked, however, is that there have been no reports of students doing anything other than accepting the tickets in this incident. The situation could have easily erupted into a free-for-all. That many students pulled over at one time could have easily run from police. They could have sabotaged officers by giving wrong names and/or birth dates. Several said they thought about doing just that. But they didn't.
Trust me, I'm a Manual grad, class of 1971. Many of my classmates would not have been nearly as respectful of authority.
Pam Adams is a columnist with the Peoria Journal Star. Her e-mail address is padams@pjstar.com.